OCZ will soon launch its Vertex 2 Pro, an SSD adoption controller SandForce SF-1500. The California Company proclaimed two novel controllers in April. Even then the theoretical performance pledges were very good, but obviously without the product in hand, caution was required.

A few months later, and after alliances with OCZ and A-Data, our colleague Anandtech has released the first test of one of these controllers. SandForce working on his two babies since 2007 and it will take another few months we found a DSS embarking SF-1500 in stores. Vertex 2 Pro OCZ tested here includes a SF-1500 (SF-1200 is designed for mobile use and recall) and the Intel flash memory.

This flash drive does not flash, the controller being designed so that it is not necessary. A capacitor of high capacity ensures data integrity in case of temporary loss of power. For what is life, SandForce uses a technology called DuraWrite.

When the operating system asks a flash disk to store data, it should logically write as much as necessary. However, this is not always the case, and for a write request to 1GB, SSD will write some more significantly, to 10 or 20 times. The very good Intel X25-M reached a value of 1.1 x Hon But SandForce done better, much better, with DuraWrite, this value is only 0.5 x! The controller then compresses the data, which reduces wear on the flash memory significantly. In this example, 25 GB for Windows written by only 11 GB of flash memory are used.

All flash drives have an additional percentage of cells that prevent data loss in case one or more blocks become defective. This percentage varies considerably between producers. OCZ will distribute its Vertex 2 Pro with 50, 100, 200 as well as 400 GB of storage capability, when in reality they include 64, 128, 256 as well as 512 GB MLC flash memory. So it is almost 27% of the capability that is set aside to guarantee reliability at both storage as well as performance. Obviously, this a very negative impact on the cost of the GB flash disk, for this causes the SSD "general public" who adopt a controller SandForce will more likely have more generous capacity, around 60, 120, 240 as well as 480 GB which gives us almost 13% less.

The OCZ Vertex 2 Pro tested here was still a prototype, and yet the performance is already outstanding. It is simply the limits of the standard Serial ATA 3 Gb / s in sequential reads and writes, with values of about 260 MB / s random writes of 4 KB are also monstrous at 50.9 Mb / s the or the excellent Intel X25-M G2 is around 35-40 MB / s. Finally, we looked forward to seeing the SSD-based SandForce land!

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